


Spies and Soldiers do not have a home.

by DitescoMori



Category: Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 23:01:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2485397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DitescoMori/pseuds/DitescoMori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is your loneliest and darkest hour. It is your hour. Giving that up is unthinkable. You choose to count your sins with the same stringent methods you count your bullets with: you make the count twice, you go back and you double check. You make sure you don’t let anything out in order to make sure your atonement is complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spies and Soldiers do not have a home.

I am sure you have seen it: the minute light that cracks in the midst of the plastic drapes of a place you are so reluctant to call home, so your mind seeks avidly for any sort of synonyms that describe anything, but. Instead, you find yourself weaving nouns like solace, safe-house, a haven, any sort of name that will bound it to your profession: aloof and impersonal. You tether around the word because it is scathing, and you cannot take the itch it makes your skin crawl with, you cannot shake off the taste of bile it brings to your stomach. You shun the word because it inevitably draws the connotation of a sense of belonging, and you tell yourself people like you do not have a home, you don’t get that luxury, you don’t deserve it. You get a roof and four walls and a decent meal every now and then and you should be satisfied. So, you choose to shed skin after skin in no different fashion like the world changes its seasons. You are warmth when you want to, a palliative breeze when you least expect it to, quiet and demure and cold and all the qualities you could ever think of. The fire that keeps you warm at night combusts with embers of names and personalities you donned and you believed you were and you rehearsed that name in front of the mirror time and time again, until the person that stared back at you was not really you (because your eyes aren’t blue and your smile is crooked and bent), and for once, you weren’t you and it felt alright.

This is why the light is so terrifying. Because that light comes when you are at your loneliest. When you have cleaned your gun enough times, checked your alarms for the third time, retraced your steps from the living room to your room for nothing other than the sake of keeping you active, from giving free reign to your thoughts, from keeping them to come back and haunt you.

It is your loneliest and darkest hour. It is **_your_** hour. Giving that up is unthinkable. You choose to count your sins with the same stringent methods you count your bullets with: you make the count twice, you go back and you double check. You make sure you don’t let anything out in order to make sure your atonement is complete.

You never realize there is someone out there, terrified of the same light, for the same reasons. Except he is a soldier, and his mind has been tugged and pulled at and destroyed and tampered in all humanly and inhumanly ways possible, to the point where he doesn’t know if he is a boy from Brooklyn, a soldier fighting the war that killed his father, a soviet weapon. One who washes the blood off his hands every night even though he has not killed tonight (no, not tonight, tonight he heard him again, and he remembered fireworks and the smell of caramelized cashews and a song of happy birthday), who handles his sins with the same diligence as you do, but in his mind they are all means to an end to make them pay, to make them understand (no, no, that is not quite alright, he wants them to suffer) for a second, a minute or hour, what it was like for him all those years.

You don’t see him in the rain or in the shower, or when it is dark enough. You don’t see him remember that you once, made him feel human. That you gave his hands another meaning other than destruction. That you showed him the crimson could stand for love, fire, and complete combustion of two entities, and not the blood. You don’t see him miss that. You don’t read the agony in his eyes, or the way his feet sometimes falter, missing a step, the step you both missed all those years ago in that place where you both lost so many things, but made up for in your own ways.

You see it but you _**choose**_ not to see it. Because spies and soldiers do not have a home.


End file.
